


Prayer

by Charolastra



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Christian Hymns, F/M, Gen, Jewish Hymns, M/M, Minor Dave/Klaus Hargreeves, Time Travel, Vietnam War, War Trauma, church, soldier Klaus Hargreeves
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-20
Updated: 2019-07-20
Packaged: 2020-07-09 13:48:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19888843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Charolastra/pseuds/Charolastra
Summary: Now 3 months into the Vietnam war, Klaus is back in Saigon from a mission, and finds himself in a dilapidated Buddhist temple turned Catholic church forUS soldiers. Klaus can't explain why he's drawn to it, nor can he explain why a redheaded nurse has the urge to sit down in a pew and sing with him.





	Prayer

**Bạn đã mất một ai đó?**

_You lost someone?_

**Băn khoăn hay lạc lối?**

_Disturbed or astray?_

**Kitô hữu vào bên trong.**

_Christians come in._

_  
_

_  
_

Well, it was better than nothing.

Klaus approached the dilapidated church on the corner, less than excited to enter this "holy" building. Whether it was something to behold before or just as mediocre, the Ho Minha congregational church had seen better days. There was no bell hung in the bell tower; The roof had a few cracked or wholly absent shingles; the stained glass windows were dirty, dusty, turning Jesus' family portrait into a caricature of life in the Dust Bowl. Door hinges squealed age-old protests as he stepped through the door.

The inside was a little neater: pews in careful arrays and a podium up front, with risers just behind that might have been for the choir. Reginald was a stickler about church for a while, forced the siblings to go, so the whole thing wasn't entirely foreign. The familiarity was just too distant to touch. Bad memories had pushed it from Klaus's mind, like a kite with it's string spooled all the way out.

Klaus felt the briefest chill skitter along his spine.  
He felt a little uncomfortable just standing. His sleeveless jacket showed his many tattoos to, for all he knew, some Buddhist God or Monk that curated the church. He was doing a shit job if there _was,_ and the scruffy little man got the feeling it still wasn't the case.

Klaus ran a callused finger along the back of a pew. His pad came back dusty. Was it a Vietnamese rule to not clean anything more than twice a year? Klaus rubbed his finger and thumb to dispell the muck and walked on to the very first pew. Somewhere in the surrounding halls, music echoed, muted, like the sound of solemn chimes playing in tandem.

" _Ya'aseh shalom...ya'aseh shalom_..."

Gee.

What had Klaus come here for? He almost forgot. With the whole lack of sanctity and the almost complete lack of people (excluding the Vietnamese woman who very clearly avoided being in the same room with him).

" _Oseh shalom bim' romav_.... _aleinu, v'al kol yisrael._.."

It sounded something like Hindu or Hebrew, whatever that language was called. Jewish folk occupied one-half of the Christian Church, apparently. Fuck it. It was Vietnam. The fact that this temple had been converted to a Christian hideaway meant it was an act found by coercion. Any and all churches they found along the war path would probably have the same origins. Klaus might've questioned the morality of the whole thing, but he only recognized that prayer because he had spent more than a few nights in the shelter of church arches and stoops, listening to the sermons or prayers or hymns while trying to sleep. They typically went in one ear, out the other, disappearing in the air like curls of smoke from his nose.

Klaus found it soothing despite himself. He took a seat in one dusty pew, hunched over. A sigh rattled around the confines of his ribcage. Why had he even come here? What was this supposed to achieve?

_Need something?_

Probably, Klaus thought. Mentally, he replaced the wall between him and the ghosts hovering in the back of his mind. Then a shadow fell over his shoulders, his legs, and the dark man twitched his head up to see what had caused it.

"Need something?" A short woman with fire red hair repeated in a gentle tone, reaching tentatively for Klaus's shoulder. Concern lit up the brown of her eyes into something like brushed gold.

"No, no, just uh...thiiiinking." Klaus let the last syllable drawl out as his train of thought briefly derailed. The nurse just smiled, placating, smoothing her scrub skirt with dried stains on it; she sat a foot away from the stranger on the pew. Klaus never flinched at blood, but something about the skirt made his throat close up. The _gore_ she must've just saw to end up with such marks. There were splatters, and splotches like someone with bloodied hands had grabbed her, or--

"I'm a nurse."

Klaus jumped. "Pa-pardon?"

"The blood. I'm a nurse. MASH unit one-oh-nine." Her smile fell. Klaus waited for further explanation. She didn't give it.

"I'm just a soldier," Klaus hummed. "I think..33rd. Y'know, the whole war would be a lot more tolerable without all the 5-mile marches."

The nurse giggled at that, giving Klaus room to relax as much as he physically could. She had no reason to believe he didn't belong here. Or that a briefcase mistakenly brought him from New York, 2017 to Saigon, 1964. "I'm Klaus."

"Bonnie."

The silence went on for a while after that. The Jewish hymns petered out, started up again; the praying Buddhists spoke in hushed whispers with their foreheads pressed to points at the foot of a bronze statue. Bonnie fidgeted, sniffled, then suddenly plucked a hymn book from the back of the pew. She moved closer. "Sing with me, Klaus?"

Klaus hissed through clenched teeth. Should've known. _God damned southern Jesus freaks_.

"I don't, um, remember many hymns." Seeing her face fall, he rushed to finish with, "But it would help me if you sang it. Y'know, so I can, um, pray."  
  
Bonnie nodded, and Klaus didn't miss the change in demeanor. Suddenly a determined, motherly woman replaced the trembling girl who just didn't want to be here, trying to save lives that were already gone. Gone before they hit the operating table.

"You go 'head and think about someone--someone you want to keep safe. Could be here or back stateside."

 _Dave_.

Klaus mumbled assent and ducked his head. Bonnie quirked a brow, noting the fleeting look of love in his eye, but said nothing. She eased into a gentle song as Klaus studied his feet, feeling rather useless, dumb, childish, all the colors of the rainbow of shame.

" _Make me a channel of your peace_... _When there's despair in life let me bring hope._.."

Very steadily, Klaus could feel the presence of the intangible, forming ranks around the two of them. Furtively, he glanced through his lashes at the air. Blue smoke, the shapes of bodies slowly shaping themselves. Klaus swallowed back a lump, quiet horror filling his chest like tar.

A Vietnamese boy with his leg missing at the hip, nothing but a strange blue wisp where his stump was. A middle-aged soldier, forehead split, some exposed skull in fragments just beneath, with the hardest eyes he'd ever seen. An Asian woman in elegant wear stood right beside him, caked in dried red paste, gripping the dainty hand of a child in her own. All of them, he noticed, stared straight at Bonnie. Unwavering. Intense.

Some of their auras were bright, some fading, evidence they had been dead for some time. The "fresh" auras had similarly fresh wounds, some still dropping coagulated clumps of blood around them; Some of them had clothes a size too small, namely the little ones, all of whom were not fresh and bore little to no outward wounds on clear, wood brown skin, standing with mothers and fathers who most certainly died violently. The implications of that were almost too much for Klaus to handle.

"... _Where there is darkness, holy light_... _and where there's sadness, ever joy_..."

Bonnie ran through two more verses. The song faded, as did the echo, but the ghosts remained, though their light flickered perilously. Tears threatening to fall finally dried on his cheeks. Klaus hid a sniffle with the creaking of the seat when he sat up.

"Do you think we're doing okay?" Bonnie broke the painful silence with a whisper, a quaver in her voice. "Here, I mean. Are we doing good for the people here? Should we even _be_ here?"

Standing right behind Bonnie, hands on her shoulders, a young man, smiling so softly Klaus thought it wasn't there at all. He couldn't have been more than 19 or 20. The beginnings of gory lacerations peeked from over the pew, disappeared beneath it, much to his relief. He was making noise, unintentionally, like water dropping on the ground below. Strangely, his blue aura was _strong, not_ wavery or faint like the other's. Fresh. Recent?

Bonnie couldn't feel the touch, couldn't see the ring of people around them, but Klaus met the eyes of the apparition. It nodded. Slowly, sadly, he nodded back. 

"Yes." Bonnie turned her head, taken aback, as though she hadn't expected him to answer.

  
"Yes," Klaus rasped, his breath taken from him because he honestly hadn't expected an answer himself. "Yes, I think we _are_ doing good here. One of us is."

**Author's Note:**

> The singing is inspired by lines from the song "Prayer" in the musical Come From Away. These are lyrics taken from real hymns and prayers from Judaism and Christianity.


End file.
